Songkran’s rubbish

With temperatures rising above 36C and four children playing in our small house my wife decided we should all depart for the riverside. Just 6km from our village and approximately the same distance from Thaton lies a very popular “beach”, a place that during the Songkran revelry gets more than a thousand visitors a day, to a village temporary constructed from bamboo poles where food, drink and very loud music is considered obligatory for a good time. With the holiday over and the village undergoing demolition we were unfortunately provided with a perfect scene of the aftermath of a Thai party.

The first remark from our neighbours’ six-year-old was, “Why does it smell like a pig farm?”, a question quite obviously true. Moving slightly downriver to avoid the unpleasant smell we found a decent enough patch of sand and the kids cooled off in the flowing water. During the course of their play they discovered three large beer bottles in the river which we added to the collection of plastic bags, cups, bottles and bowls that were littered all around the sight. To be honest it looked like the clearing ground for a refugee camp. The next rains will ensure all we didn’t collect washes down through Chiang Rai, over to the Golden Triangle and into the Mekong for the long journey down through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the ocean. I was left with a very simple question: What does the average Thai citizen think happens to the non-biodegradable rubbish that they leave on the riverbank? Do they think about it, are they capable of this reasoning, and if not why not? If the nation’s citizens can’t get their minds around the simple problem of rubbish dispersal, how can we ever expect them to understand all the related problems of drunk and dangerous driving on the highways? LUNGSTIB